GA2012 – XV Generative Art Conference Michele Leigh Paper : Animated Music: Early Experiments with Generative Art Abstract: This paper will explore the historical underpinnings of early abstract animation, more particularly attempts at visual representations of music. In order to set the stage for a discussion of the animated musical form, I will briefly draw connections to futurist experiments in art, which strove to represent both movement and music (Wassily Kandinsky for instance), as a means of illustrating a more explicit desire in animation to extend the boundaries of the art in terms of materials and/or techniques By highlighting the work of experimental animators like Hans Richter, Oskar Fishinger, and Mary Ellen Bute, this paper will map the historical connection between musical and animation as an early form of generative art. I will unpack the ways in which these filmmakers were creating open texts that challenged the viewer to participate in the creation of meaning and thus functioned as proto-generative art. Topic: Animation Finally, I will discuss the networked visual-music performances of Vibeke Sorenson as an artist who bridges the experimental animation Authors: tradition, started by Richter and Bute, and contemporary generative art Michele Leigh, practices. Department of Cinema & Photography This paper will lay the foundation for our understanding of the Southern Illinois history/histories of generative arts practice. University Carbondale www.siu.edu You can send this abstract with 2 files (.doc and .pdf file) to [email protected] or send them directly to the Chair of GA conferences [email protected] References: [1] Paul Wells, “Understanding Animation,” Routledge, New York, 1998. [2] Maureen Furniss, “Art in Motion: Animation Easthetics,” John Libbey Publishing, London, 2008 [3] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media,” MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001. Contact: Keywords: [email protected] Animation, Music, New Media page # 239 15h Generative Art Conference GA2012 Animated Music: Early Experiments with Generative Art Dr. Michele Leigh, PhD Department of Cinema & Photography, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, Il, USA e-mail: [email protected] Premise This paper will explore the historical underpinnings of early abstract animation, more particularly attempts at visual representations of music. In order to set the stage for a discussion of the animated musical form, I will briefly draw connections to futurist experiments in art, which strove to represent both movement and music (Wassily Kandinsky for instance), as a means of illustrating a more explicit desire in animation to extend the boundaries of the art in terms of materials and/or techniques. By highlighting the work of experimental animators like Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, and Mary Ellen Bute, this paper will map the historical connection between musical and animation as an early form of generative art. I will unpack the ways in which these filmmakers were creating open texts that challenged the viewer to participate in the creation of meaning and thus functioned as proto-generative art. Finally, I will discuss the networked visual-music performances of Vibeke Sorenson as an artist who bridges the experimental animation tradition, started by Richter and Bute, and contemporary generative art practices. This paper will lay the foundation for our understanding of the history/histories of generative arts practice. Animated Music: Early Experiments with Generative Art Dr. Michele Leigh, PhD Southern Illinois University Carbondale [email protected] “When situated as a deep-time project, history becomes a discovery process with open-ended results and multiple points of entry. If we consider the convergence of technology and the expansion of cinematic arts, the opportunity for new forms and new voices increases exponentially.” Vicki Callahan [1] In the above quote from Reclaiming the Archive, Vicki Callahan is arguing that we move away from history as a strictly linear series of events, instead she posits that we look at history as a database of occurrences/moments that overlap, intersect, and speak to each other in unique ways. Her statement could as easily have been written about the confluence of abstract animation, music and generative art, as it was about page # 240 15h Generative Art Conference GA2012 history. This paper will explore multiple entry points in the history of abstract animation in order to highlight the historical underpinnings of selected attempts to visually represent music. By drawing attention to the work of experimental animators like Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute, and Vibeke Sorenson this paper will map the historical connections between music and animation as forms of generative arts practice. Painting becomes one of the many entry points for talking about the history of abstract animation, music and generative art. Each of the animators I will discuss began their careers in painting and traditional arts practices. Lines of influence for animators Richter, Fischinger, Bute and Sorenson with avant-garde experiments in painting can be mapped directly through their involvement with these experiments themselves or indirectly through artistic training in art school. Early Twentieth Century experiments in painting by groups such as the Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), Cubists, Futurists and Suprematists, often revolved around attempts to capture the dynamism of modern life: the light, color, form and movement of the urban experience on the canvas. Combining a fascination with spiritualism and symbolic uses of color, one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter group, Vassily Kandinsky, also strove later in his career to merge visual imagery, color and music. For Kandinsky “[the painter] naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated note, for setting colour in motion.” [2] The fruit of Kandinsky’s application of musical methodology to painting can perhaps best be seem in works like Composition VI (1913) and Yellow Accompaniment (1924). The titles of the pieces alone, immediately call to mind musical arrangements and serve to reinforce the connection in Kandinsky’s mind between painting and music. “Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that (for example), yellow is the colour of middle C on a brassy trumpet; black is the colour of closure, and the end of things; and that combinations of colours produce vibrational frequencies, akin to chords played on a piano.” [3] The synaesthesia with which Kandinsky purportedly painted also functions in the mind of the viewer. For example in Composition VI, one can hear chaotic musical accompaniment of this apocalyptic painting, the struggle between light (high notes) and darkness (low notes). The viewer sees the length of lines corresponding to length of notes; curving lines accounting for fluctuations in tempo; and the jumble of colors become the instruments competing with each other to be heard, the cacophony becomes overwhelming. The desire to visually represent music and movement in painting coincided with the birth of cinema and this filmmaking naturally became a place where artists could explore visual music in a time-based medium. This new technology provided artists with a means of illustrating a more explicit desire to extend the boundaries of the art in terms of materials and/or techniques. Within filmmaking, animation, more specifically abstract animation became the place where artists could experiment with issues such as temporality, non-linearity, spirituality, dimensionality, visuality and of course musicality. These experiments range from the purely formal investigations of page # 241 15h Generative Art Conference GA2012 animators like Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983) and Hans Richter (1888-1976) to quests “for expanded consciousness and spiritual fulfilment” with animators like Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) [4] and Vibeke Sorenson (1954-present). Mary Ellen Bute’s experiments with animation arose, in part, out of an attempt to “find a method for controlling a source of light to produce images in rhythm.” [5] It was during her work with musicologist-mathematician-painter Joseph Schillinger, Bute says she “learned to compose paintings using form, line and color, as counterparts to compositions in sound, but [she] felt keenly the limitations inherent in the plastic and graphic mediums and [became] determined to find a medium in which movement would be the primary design factor. Motion picture sound film seemed to be the answer and I began to make films, most of them abstract in content.” [6] Of the 16 films that Bute created during her 20-year career, 14 of them are abstract experiments with light and sound. While little may be known of Bute now (outside academic circles), her films at the time were widely disseminated, often showing before feature films in theatres and many of them even premiering at Radio City Music Hall. Her earliest animated works, like her 1939 film Spook Sport (made with the help of Canadian animator Norman McLaren) were made using traditional animation techniques – innumerable drawings done on paper and individually photographed. Bute’s 1952 seven minute, hand-colored film Abstronic with Aaron Copland's "Hoe Down" and Don Gillis's "Ranch House Party," solidified her place in animation history as both a “America’s foremost innovator of abstract animation . [and as] a pioneer